Monday, 22 October 2012

Culture as Phenotype and Evolution's Crystal Ball

Culture as
Phenotype and

Evolution's
Crystal Ball

The issues are in the tissues.

A massage therapist once shared
with me
that piece of trade wisdom. She was making a point about the interplay
between mental and physical discomforts. She was not the first to see a
relationship between bodily and psychological experiences.

Scottish Psychiatrist R. D. Laing in the 1960s and '70s, following onto Freud and
Jung, proposed that early experiences inform not only personal
psychopathologies but also the myths of the tribe.

He was interested
particularly in myths that share a pattern with the earliest—prenatal and early
postnatal—experiences and suggested that these stories might recapitulate the
adventures of zygotes, embryos, and fetuses.

Uterine Endometrium Adopting
The Newly Arrived Blastocyst‏

In The Facts of Life, Laing cited
the story of Sargon. As an infant, the future king was placed by his parents in
a reed basket and sent down river. He drifted until AKKI, the gardener, rescued
him and raised the foundling to adulthood. Sargon then stepped into the world
to become king of Assyria. Laing, as have
others, pointed out the parallels between this story and that of the
biblical Moses. The infant Moses also was placed by his parents in a basket and
set adrift, was adopted and raised by his rescuer and eventually left the home
of the rescuer to assume a position of prominence.

Laing could have included among
his examples a more contemporary hero, Superman, whose parents placed him as an
infant into a "basket"—a rocket ship—and sent him downstream—through
interstellar space—from the doomed planet, Krypton, to Earth, where the
Earthlings Jonathan and Martha Kent discovered and adopted him. The Kents
raised the infant, whom they named Clark, to adulthood. The adult Clark Kent
then relocated from Smallville to Metropolis, where he assumed his superhero
identity.

The stories recapitulate the journeys and development of the zygote, embryo,
and fetus, suggested Laing. That is, the stories parallel the prenatal story: A
zygote, encased in a membrane, called the zona pellucida, travels
downstream—down the fallopian tube—until, as a blastocyst, it is adopted by the
uterine endometrium. Attached to the uterus, it matures into a fetus and then
is born.

Laing also cites correspondence between Freud and Jung in which the
psychoanalysts discussed another natal motif, that of the doppelganger, the
hero's atrophied and subordinate twin. Examples of hero/doppelganger pairs
include Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Romulus and Remus, and Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza. Cain and Abel could be cited. The psychoanalysts interpreted the weak or
unfortunate twin as representing that lost, discarded companion, the placenta.

Jung is most associated with the idea of the collective unconscious, but even
Freud toyed with the idea of a phylogenetic memory. In a manuscript he shared
with colleague Sandor Ferenczi and which was published posthumously as A
Phylogenetic Fantasy, Freud speculated that some psychopathologies developed as
reactions to conditions that prevailed during the ice ages.

From DNA to Phenotypes

The arrival of the first neurons provides the embryo with a mechanism, prospectively,
that can record experiences, that is, with a memory. But the developmental
stages prior to the appearance of the first neurons must record experiences by
other means (if at all). Some other means must come into play also if
phylogenetic memory can be a realistic prospect.

Aside from neurons, the physical medium that manages information during
development and from ancestor to descendant, is DNA. As an organism develops,
epigenetic regulatory mechanisms, such as
methylation, preserve patterns of genetic expression and repression. Such
control systems enable a single genotype to produce the many cell types that
make up the body of a complex organism. The zygote possess all of the genes
needed for nerves, muscles, skin and the other tissues that make up a body. The
necessary genes express themselves or get expressed, and repressed, in a
predictable sequence as the organism develops.

It turns out that epigenetic controls work in much the same way during evolution.
They enable relatively slight genomic variations to produce the Earth's wealth
of species. DNA turns out to be highly conserved during evolution, with
epigenetic mechanisms shouldering much of the responsibility for the diversity
of phenotypes. This is so much the case that some researchers have proposed
that science adopt the model of a "universal genome," referring to
the stock of DNA that is conserved across species. In Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa (Cell Cycle 6:15,
August 2007) researcher Michael Sherman argues precisely for such a common
genome. His case rests largely on the presence of genes in descendant species
that are present already in remote ancestral species.

"So many examples of [DNA] conservation have now been found that it is no
longer considered surprising. We can now state with confidence that most animal
phyla possess essentially the same genes, and that some (but not all) of these
genes change their developmental roles infrequently in evolution."

What goes unremarked in "universal genome" proposals is that they
imply a state of affairs that conflicts with science's current view of nature.

Namely, such proposals imply that evolution constitutes the unfolding of
pre-programmed developmental stages, which implies that evolution is a process
of development, an ontogeny.

And that implies that DNA harbors information about not only the evolutionary
past of species, but also about the evolutionary future of species, in the same
(or in some similar) way as it harbors information about not only the
developmental past—e.g., totipotent and pluripotent cell phenotypes—of a fetus but
also about the kid's developmental future. And just as myth and ritual, the
"deep grammar" of culture, can express or encode developmental
stages, as Laing and others have suggested, so too might they express or encode
evolutionary stages, past and future.

Astrology, for example. Why did
ancient peoples the world over attach so much significance to the night sky's
twinkling dots? Stars served navigators as references, but beyond that what
inspired the ancients to conclude that those dots held sway over human fortunes
and misfortunes? The dots gave off no heat, nor any sound. They could not be
touched. They emitted no scent. Why imagine that they had any practical
consequences at all?

The star larvae hypothesis suggests that the history of astrolatry, astrotheology, astral religion, and astrology,
the last with its persistent following, all express an intuition of humankind's
collective calling, which is to participate in the stellar life cycle. The star
larvae hypothesis takes the star as biology's imago and so gives stars a stake in
human affairs. The varieties of astral concern suggest that the ancients
intuited such an intimate relationship between stars and humans.

Another oddity is the religious sentiment that takes the astral world to be one
of prospective human habitation, whether in the flesh or in the spirit. What
possessed the ancient world to conceive of the skies, turf of the twinkling
dots, as not only a hospitable, but an essentially utopian, habitat, something
to long for and work toward? The association of heaven with the sky and the
promise of human ascension to it, in their various forms, via flesh or soul,
are peculiar religious conventions. From what wellspring of imagination do such
wild ideas arise?

The star larvae hypothesis suggests that the mytheme of "heaven
above" anticipates the literal ascension of space habitation. Heaven, the astral
planes of the occult traditions, and other intuitions of rarefied,
extraplanetary realms reveal something in the genes that looks forward to a
celestial, weightless world.

Traditional Rendering of
Transhumans

The world's folkways also report a
grade of extraterrestrials intermediate between humans and stars, the angels.
These winged, weightless entities get rendered variously, but a persistent form
is that of the putto, the winged infant. What is behind the convention that
uses flying babies to represent evolved spiritual beings?

It turns out that about 8 percent of the human genome consists of nonhuman DNA.
These alien DNA sequences are viral, evidently inserted into the human genome
by infections suffered in antiquity. Viral DNA sequences, such as these, that
become part of the host genome, are widespread among creatures. They are called
endogenous retroviruses.

At the cellular level, it turns out that only about 10 percent of the cells in
a human body are human. The other 90 percent are bacterial, symbionts without
which human metabolism would cease. Researchers studying the complex ecology of
the body have coined the term microbiome
to designate the body itself as a complex ecosystem harboring dozens of species.

So, the human body plays host to alien genes and cells. But did the aliens
arrive from outer space? The circumstantial evidence continues to grow.

From
the ongoing discovery of more, and more complex, organic molecules in space, to the discovery of extremophile organisms
that survive in environments to which terrestrial selection pressures could not
have forced adaptation, to apparent remnants of micro-organisms in meteorites, the
circumstantial case for panspermia—the infall of viruses and
micro-organisms from space—becomes more solid every day. The Ancient Astronaut
stories might be onto something, even if the extraterrestrials that penetrate
human bodies in no way resemble the expected humanoids.

Culture As Phenotype

The
point of all this is to suggest that the evolutionary program is available for
reviewing and previewing through myth and lore, and perhaps through
psychopatholology, as is the developmental program, which is to suggest a
reappraisal of evolutionary psychology.

The star larvae
hypothesis suggests that DNA carries, or transceives, information
pertaining to the psyche's archetypal forms—heroes, demons, initiatory
transformations, and so on—just as it carries, or transceives, information
pertaining to the anatomical forms of mouths, hands, hearts, and so on. This is
a conservative formulation. It shouldn't rock any boat in the world of
evolutionary psychology. It adheres to the scientific dogma of materialism and
method of reductionism. It suggests a sub-discipline: Evolutionary Archetypal
Psychology.

(This formulation also recalls the Platonic doctrine of Forms, which regards
this world as the translation of abstract potential into a set of physical
actuals. The physical forms are determinate variations, or particularizations,
of indeterminate potential. As the Platonic Form of "triangle"
includes three angles, excludes curvature, and is indeterminate regarding area,
the genome of a species of shark, or the genotype of a particular shark,
includes fins, excludes lungs, and is indeterminate regarding spatial volume.
Specific cultural renderings of, say, the heroic journey, similarly represent
particularizations of indeterminate, archetypal forms. The stories share common
patterns but vary in detail by local custom.)

If ethology and/or
sociobiology
and/or gene-culture coevolution and/or evolutionary
psychology and/or behavioral ecology and/or niche
construction are to be taken seriously as science (sorry, but the evolving
vocabulary seems more politically correct than scientifically expedient, though
one can hardly blame the scientists, because the notion of behavior's genetic
roots aggravates sociocultural tensions—see for example the recounting of
sociobiology's reception at Harvard in Promethean Fire, by E. O. Wilson and
Charles Lumsden), then culture must be seen as a phenotype, which is to say that
history is in the genes, which is to find the issues in the tissues

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